Anchoring Vignettes

Anchoring vignettes are a survey method for making self-assessments comparable across people and cultures. When respondents are asked to rate their own political efficacy, health, or freedom on an ordinal scale, different groups interpret the scale differently — what one culture calls 'a lot of freedom' another calls 'some.' This differential item functioning makes raw self-reports incomparable. The method, introduced by King, Murray, Salomon, and Tandon in 2004, has each respondent also rate several hypothetical characters described identically to everyone, then uses those vignette ratings to recover where each respondent's own scale lies and to rescale their self-assessment onto a common metric.